01 March 2009

The 20 links game

The Washington Post's standards of truth are, apparently, that if you can provide 20 links to support your article, that's good enough for them. (see quotes from their Ombudsman and some responses at, say, http://getenergysmartnow.com/2009/02/28/washpost-ombudsman-steps-up-and-steps-in-it-plus-another-will-fabrication/).

I boggle. Granted that this isn't that rare (part of why I'm good at the game of that name).

So the game is to find 20 links (bonus for 20 links from 20 different sites) to support:
  • The earth is flat
  • The earth is the center of the solar system
  • There is no greenhouse effect
  • Carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas
  • The moon landings were faked
  • The earth is less than 100,000 years old
  • The earth is more than 1 trillion years old
  • Humans have been on the earth fewer than 10,000 years
  • Humans have been on the earth more than 50,000,000 years
  • Elvis is alive
  • Space aliens kidnap children
  • ... and any another statement of this caliber
I'm making it harder for you than the Post did for Will. You have to get your 20 links to support a single, clear statement. They approved the article with a number of (erroneous) statements which totalled support of 20 links. Still, I think 20 links is 20 minutes for any outrageous statement of your choosing will not be difficult.

If you post your 20, please use rel="nofollow" in the links. If you're not sure how, note that and I'll do it. Or just post the statement that you found your 20 links to support -- but only after you find the actual links (but save them, there might be later use).

15 comments:

Kim said...

I don't know how to do "no follow," but I think I've found 20 sources for "the Earth is expanding." One is an AAPG abstract... from 2007, not from S. Warren Carey's active publishing days. (Are there bonus points for finding something presented at a scientific meeting?)

Anonymous said...

Thank you. This is, amid the sad situation of denier discussions, one of the best laughs I've had re The Will Affair.

Robert Grumbine said...

Kim: Oh, definitely bonus points for something presented at a scientific meeting!

Siegel: Thanks. I moved on since you and others have been doing such a good job on the facts. "Sometimes the best argument is a belly laugh."

Anonymous said...

The Earth is less than 100ky old (Part I of II):

• Evidence for a Young World by D. Russell Humphreys, Ph.D: http://tinyurl.com/95ztl
• The Age of the Earth by Randy S. Berg: http://tinyurl.com/5krzmk
• Age of the Earth, Medical Science, Adam, Eve, Eden, and the Flood by Joseph Mastropaolo: http://tinyurl.com/bb4e5l
• Young Age for the Moon and Earth by Thomas G. Barnes: http://tinyurl.com/cc3ypd
• Where Can We See Young-Earth Evidence? by John D. Morris, Ph.D: http://tinyurl.com/b4y3ye
• Evidence for a young world from Christian Answers: http://tinyurl.com/an3wo6
• What is the most compelling scientific evidence of a young earth? from Answers In Genesis: http://tinyurl.com/acukbf
• The World: Born in 4004 BC? by Larry Pierce: http://tinyurl.com/2ruepn
• Tree Rings and Biblical Chronology by Frank Lorey: http://tinyurl.com/cp78b3

As you can see, evidence has been gathered across multiple scientific and historic disciplines, and not only offers positive evidence for a Young Earth, but also exposes the silly claims of Old Earth Materialists as undeniably flawed.

Second ten links to follow...

[I'll make sure the 20 in total are linked to the "article" titles and open in new windows]

Unknown said...

Kim, here's the brief tutorial on how to do nofollow. Type the link in manually, using the following format:

{a href="http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm" rel="nofollow"}Demonstration Link{/a}

Make sure you replace the braces with pointy brackets. Doing so turns that line into:

Demonstration Link

All you need to do is make sure the "Demonstration link" says what you want the comment to say, while the "href=" bit points to the right URL.

If all of that is too complex, TinyURL does the trick too.

This post is a great idea, by the way. I'll see what I can dig up.

Joshua said...

I'll join in the game if I have time. But in the meantime a minor note: Blogger's default setting automatically puts nofollow tags in any additon to a comments thread so you don't need to do anything special.

Joshua said...

Whee! 20 links that the Earth is flat!

1. http://tinyurl.com/aqtbxm A hundred proofs the Earth is not a Globe
2. http://tinyurl.com/akucj7 The Flat Earth Round Earth controversy
3 http://tinyurl.com/atyfya Zetetic Astronomy
4. http://tinyurl.com/6enbaq Do they really think the earth is flat?
5. http://tinyurl.com/blxocu The Flat Out Truth
6. http://tinyurl.com/acxpjw The Flat Earth FAQ
7. http://tinyurl.com/ynk3ma Iraqi TV Debate:Is the Earth Flat
8. http://tinyurl.com/dkpszq Why a Flat Earth?
9. http://tinyurl.com/cp8sn2 Earth Not a Globe
10. http://tinyurl.com/amozh7 Zetetic Cosmogony

11. http://tinyurl.com/coxrle Is the Earth a Liquid Water Bell?
12. http://tinyurl.com/dlhfww Earth Not a Globe
13. http://tinyurl.com/bohhr2 Flat Earth Rendering

And this is the point where I start using multiple items from the Flat Earth Society:

14. http://tinyurl.com/bzpt3c Flat Earth Map Repository
15. http://tinyurl.com/byssxu What Magellan's Voyage Didn't Prove
16. http://tinyurl.com/b3du27 Do they really think the earth is flat?
17. http://tinyurl.com/aj5uu4 Flat And Infinte Space?
18. http://tinyurl.com/cv52sk Our Flat Planet
19. http://tinyurl.com/d2q8wh Christian Topography
20. http://tinyurl.com/dal7hu Another Flat Earth society

quasarpulse said...

The Earth is less than 100,000 years old and the Biblical flood explains the results of carbon dating..
Link 1
The Bible teaches the earth was covered in a watery cataclysm about 4,400 years ago. A global flood would have buried large pre-flood forests and animals. As a result of this, the flood buried large amounts of carbon. Animals that lived right after the flood may not have had as much carbon-14 available because of the global flood.
Link 2
The amount of fossil fuels indicates there must have been a vastly larger quantity of vegetation in existence prior to the Flood than exists today. This means that the biosphere just prior to the Flood might have had 500 times more carbon in living organisms than today. This would further dilute the amount of 14C and cause the 14C/12C ratio to be much smaller than today.
Link 3
"It is obvious, therefore, that any genuine correlation of the radio carbon method with definite historical chronologies is limited only to sometime after the Flood and the dispersion. The major assumptions in the method are evidently valid in this period, but this does not prove their validity for more ancient times, the periods in which we would infer that the assumptions are very likely wrong and therefore the datings are also wrong."
Link 4
If the Bible is true, the whole Theory of Carbon Dating is therefore invalidated, because the whole planet was immersed in water, and everything will therefore appear, by Carbon Dating methods, to be very much older than it actually is, based on the quantity of Radioactive Carbon-14 found to be present.

Proponents of Carbon Dating have therefore discount Noah's Flood completely, which completely invalidates their assumptions.
Link 5 (Do I get bonus points for an actual university link?)
The RATE team has used this anomaly to advance an alternative theory. Noting that 14C exists in samples which should be 14C dead and thus providing an age for the samples around 50,000 years, the RATE team has come up with a theory for how such an inconsistency could occur. After rejecting contamination as a possibility for the presence of background radiocarbon, the team has come up with a model in which the accounts outlined in the Bible, specifically Noah's flood, explains the observed 14C.
Link 6
What about the amount of 14C that had been available to that life cycle? A lot of that was also buried. Remember that 14C is generated by cosmic rays, in the upper atmosphere. Before the Flood, there was probably a lot of water vapor (or a vapor canopy) surrounding the earth. There is also good evidence that the earth's magnetic field was much stronger in pre-Flood times than it is today. Both of these effects would have shielded the earth from cosmic rays, so that there were not nearly as many as bombard us today, and therefore the amount of 14C generated each hour was probably much less than today.
Link 7 (Bonus: cold fusion is real!)
One catastrophic event in man's history was the Flood of Noah, as described in the Bible in the book of Genesis. Carbon Dating, Cold Fusion, and a Curve Ball will explain how it is thought that the monstrous Flood-called the Great Deluge-could conceivably bring about massive amounts of nuclear changes in earth material, further upsetting the balance of certain elements used to "date" things.
Link 8
How likely are the new claims to withstand critical scrutiny? First, the new conclusions rely on radiocarbon analysis which yielded dates up to 12,000 years. Obviously, those dates cannot be correct because the global Flood only occurred around 4,300 years ago.
Link 9 (bonus for magnetic field crackpottery)
The problem is, the magnetic field is decaying around the earth. The earth is covered in a magnetic field, which is STEADILY losing its strength by 1/2 every 1400 years. There are no magnetic reversals--there are only areas of stronger and weaker magnetism. So, if there are no reversals, then we know that the magnetic field has been shrinking at a measurably-stable rate. So, by the half-life of the magnetic field, the magnetic field would have been 320% stronger around 4500 years ago. But the thing is, the magnetic field filters out a lot of radiation (radiation is needed to make C-14).
Link 10
All he did was prove that this method is not realiable. So this means one of two things: Either A) If the C14 is not fluctuating, that proves the earth is less than 30,000 years old, or B) the C14 is fluctuating and carbon dating is completely inaccurate.
Link 11
Link 12
Link 13
Link 14
Link 15 (bonus for pretending to be real science)
Link 16
Link 17
Link 18 (with global warming crackpottery)
Link 19
Link 20
I think that's 20 different sites.

Anonymous said...

Black is white:

drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/02/15/up_is_down_black_is_white_night_is_day_communists_are_capitalists

www.caught.net/nwsltr/candef.htm

www.allacademic.com/meta/p243013_index.html

www.huffingtonpost.com/hooman-majd/black-is-white_b_6334.html

www.counterpunch.org/fantina04122008.html

gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/02/good-is-bad-up-is-down-black-is-white.html

thinkprogress.org/2008/10/12/mccain-troopergate-response/

njmg.typepad.com/moneyblog/2009/02/black-is-white-and-up-is-down.html

techdirt.com/articles/20081203/1910033014.shtml

edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2007/11/07/up-is-down-black-is-white/

daringfireball.net/2007/02/macrovision_translation

www.ericumansky.com/2004/12/dept_of_black_i.html

skypejournal.com/blog/2006/04/black_is_white_up_is_down_priv.html

www.argmax.com/mt_blog/archive/2004_01_black_is_white.php

www.imdb.com/title/tt0010995/

www.allacademic.com/meta/p114185_index.html

scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2007/05/up_is_down_black_is_white.php

query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30F17FB385E15738DDDAE0894DF405B8984F0D3

www.babalublog.com/archives/005423.html

www.armscontrolwonk.com/447/down-is-up-black-is-white

QED, WTF.

Robert Grumbine said...

Kim: Have a chance to fill out your 20?

Thingsbreak: Are the 2nd 10 ready?

Bayesian bouffant: Hmm, I don't think we can give you full credit. The Post might, since the phrase 'black is white' does show up. But, unlike the flat earth ones (for instance), the authors aren't actually arguing that black is indeed white.

So far, I think the lead is to quasarpulse for having 20 to different sites supporting the statement. Kim, if she can get that modern AAPG abstract would take the lead (none of the young earth refs from quasarpulse are from scientific conferences). Joshua's 20 links from 15 different sites is a good effort.

Still room for more!

Anonymous said...

But, unlike the flat earth ones (for instance), the authors aren't actually arguing that black is indeed white.

You haven't seen George Will's links, so you don't know whether his are superior in that regard.

But, for extra credit, I will give you a link to the Testimony of Gerardus Dingeman Bouw, a proponent of geocentricity. Bouw has a B.S. in astrophysics, and a Ph.D. in astronomy. That's a pretty potent combination of woo and credentials.

quasarpulse said...

Hm. If Dr. Bouw wants to be a creationist, so be it...but I draw the line at bastardizing relativity to justify geocentrism. Motion may not be "real," but acceleration is!

Anonymous said...

If Dr. Bouw wants to be a creationist, so be it...but I draw the line at bastardizing relativity to justify geocentrism

"First, they came for the evolutionary biologists, but I did not stand up because I was not an evolutionary biologist..."

I enjoy it when Creationists occasionally tip their hand and reveal that biology is only first in line, but that eventually they plan to destroy all the sciences.

bi -- International Journal of Inactivism said...

Robert, if I find 2 different links giving the same write-up, does that count as 1 or 2?

-- bi

Robert Grumbine said...

Since we're inspired by the Post on this one, I guess I'll go with 2. What topic are you taking on?